One of ARM’s more unusual acquisitions in recent years has been Geomerics, a fellow UK company who specializes in video game lighting technology. Geomerics is a far cry from ARM’s day-to-day business of developing hardware blocks and ISAs to license to customers who want to put together their own chips, but Geomerics has been a long-term play for the company. By investing in a company with strong ties to the video gaming industry, ARM would in turn gain an important tool in helping to bring higher quality lighting to SoC-class GPUs, and also help to ensure that such important middleware was including SoC-class GPUs in their feature & performance targets.
With GDC 2015 taking place this week, the ARM is seeing the first real payoff...